ARE YOU RECENTLY ADMITTED TO THE BAR, OR AWAITING BAR RESULTS, BUT NEED EXPERIENCE FOR THAT FIRST JOB?

General practice attorney with more than twenty years of experience is willing to train a small number of recently admitted attorneys, or those awaiting bar results. For a monthly fee, you will be able to shadow the experienced attorney, and learn by watching the day to day practice of law. Observe the following types of proceedings, as they occur; Civil Short Calender motion arguments, foreclosure mediation’s, pre-trial conferences, Workers Compensation and Social Security hearings, real estate closings, discovery proceedings and compliance, research and general office operations. Once admitted to the bar, the goal is to have you handling matters with and eventually without supervision. We reserve the right to limit participation in any or all activities, and all appearances are subject to the client and presiding judges approval. Admitted attorneys will be paid referral fees, if your referred case settles.

In my previous profession, this was actually fairly common, and it wasn’t just “improve your job prospects”: You were required to do several thousand hours of shadowing as part of the training before becoming professionally licensed, and many ‘masters’ would indeed charge their apprentice to do so. I’m talking up to two years of full-time work, without remuneration and even charging “tuition.”

We have actually returned to the medieval tradition of apprentices needing to pay a fee to learn from their masters. Five hundred years of advancement in the ways in which we provide and fund education and it’s come back to this.

The lawyer posting this ad should be subject to professional sanction. If that’s not possible, the rules should be changed such that it is possible in the future. He should at the very least be made a subject of ridicule.

I actually think that some sort of apprenticeship could be a viable alternative to the law school model, particularly as law schools aren’t particularly interested in teaching the actual practice of law.

But without (dischargeable) loans or actual compensation, it’s just indentured servitude.

Didn’t we actually have apprenticeship as a route to a legal career in this country, not all that long ago? I recall from reading Caro on LBJ that LBJ considered becoming a lawyer by such a route, in a state that did not require a law degree to pass the bar.

I love the smell of neofeudalism in the morning. Or neomanorialism if you prefer.

Either way, it appears that I wasn’t far off when I joked with some friends a few months ago that pretty soon, employment will be considered a gift that our new lords allow us to have and for which we’ll have to pay for the privilege.

No, medieval apprentices had a better deal. Medieval masters were required to provide lodging and food and actually had to educate them in the trade. Modern day masters have no such obligation and don’t even have to really educate you. You get to pay for the privilege of making copies and getting coffee.

A while ago I mentioned on this blog that I was in hospital for an extremely serious infection, one that is usually fatal, and almost always permanently disabled. (Necrotizing fasciitis, for those who are wondering.) In my case through sheer fluke I was diagnosed at least a day or two earlier than most patients ever would be, much increasing my chances of survival.

In any event what I wanted to say was yesterday I was discharged from the hospital with a truly horrific scar, but a prognosis of not merely survival but complete functional recovery. According to the team of doctors, and you get only the best with rare stuff like this, the expected recovery verges on a medical miracle.

All that aside, it was the commenters and proprietors of LGM, alicublog, and Sadly, No, who kept me sane and connected with the outside world. Always remember your audience is not just fellow lefties and trolls, but also people like I was, depending upon you for the wit, erudition, and vicious sarcasm you display with such élan.

Thank you, I now return you to sniping at jenbob and bickering with joe from Lowell.

Get off your high horse for one freaking minute, or are you one of those conservatives who claim that “libruls politicize everything” Manju?

Good to hear that you did much better than expected. There are other kinds of infections, like the bubonic plague, or meningitis, where an early diagnosis can mean the difference between life and death.

Short version: it’s a rare infection of subcutaneous tissue that spreads rapidly and, unchecked, results in massive tissue destruction and death. You’ve probably heard it called an infection of “flesh-eating bacteria”, though that’s not what they actually do.

Rhino, if you care to see what someone else went through, go check http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=3085 the blog of Canadian science fiction writer Peter Watts. The bugs attacked his calf. He posted photos – not for the squeamish. But he, like you, was one of the lucky ones who got treatment in time. Or as he puts it, ” Not lucky; none of we flesh-eaten are lucky. But I’ve got to be the least unlucky bastard alive.”

I believe that young Richard Carstone, one of the ultimately crestfallen claimants in Bleak House, entered into a similar arrangement in his desultory pursuit of a suitable gentleman’s profession. We appear to have overshot the gilded age by half a century or more.

Young Richard Carstone did not have a law degree or even a university degree. He was a school-leaver for whom John Jarndyce purchased first a medical and thereafter a legal apprenticeship. In both cases he was given formal guidance and time to study, as well as expected to work.

I don’t know if an Oxbridge graduate with a degree in law would have been expected to pay to work, but if they proceeded to study at the inns of the courts they probably were expected to support themselves as necessary until they were fully admitted to the bar.

Need to correct myself here: the degrees in law did not begin until well after the time in Bleak House (events took place in the 1820s). Still, Tulkinghorn must have had a much better education, and a classier aprenticeship, than Guppy.

Hmmm…and then can also learn to write using apostrophes for plurals (they can observe “mediation’s”), while omitting apostrophes for possessives (they need “presiding judges approval”, aka, the approval of presiding judges).